In many areas of television broadcasting, and sports broadcasting in particular, live feed of an event is often provided to the viewers using a production team operating a production switcher. In most cases, the viewers are also interested in watching highlights or replays of interesting plays either shortly after the occurrence of the interesting play in the event, during break time (e.g. half time) or shortly after the event ends.
Typically, live events, such as sporting events, public speeches (e.g. presidential speeches), concerts etc. are covered by a production teams, usually situated in a productions truck. In a production truck, there are usually numerous monitors on a wall, a production switcher with a 1,000+ buttons on a desk, a person operating the production switcher (“technical director”) and a director or producer responsible for instructing the operation of the production switcher to produce a media clip (e.g. a highlight clip, a playback clip etc.). Usually, the director watches the monitors on the wall that are receiving live streams or angles of the event from different sources, and tells the technical director what to do, such as “go to input 5” or “fade to input 7” etc. The technical director operates the production switcher to put any camera, person, or replay in the media clip being produced by pressing the right buttons. The director plans at least four or five steps ahead and makes sure all the important things in the event are caught and included in the highlight or playback feeds. Typically, the production team also has an audio consultant who makes sure that the audio is properly synchronized with the video being displayed.
Typically, when a media clip is produced by the production team, the clip is then broadcasted on various platforms, for example, television, internet etc. Since the clip is produced either simultaneously as the event or shortly after the event ends, the clip is typically produced in a rush for an immediate release. Consequently, the produced clip may have glitches, such as, missing footage from the event, synchronization issues between the video and the audio, incorrect order of footage etc.
A media clip produced in this manner, using a traditional production switcher, cannot be easily corrected or reworked. In order to create an accurate media clip, or make changes to the existing media clip, the production work has to be typically restarted from scratch. Such an approach is labor, time and cost intensive.